My parents have tried. My teachers have tried. My bosses have tried. Over the years, my inability to keep quiet has been the despair of my friends, my colleagues, my kid. About the only person who’s never asked me to shut up is my dog. And that’s probably only because she’s non-verbal – despite all my best efforts to teach her to speak.

Over the years, I’m sure there are plenty of politicians who could have cheerfully throttled me because of the questions I’ve asked and the columns I’ve written. But thus far, no one’s tried – and no one’s succeeded.

Emotions were running high, and so was public interest. I was filing terse little reports about as quickly as my fingers could type, trying to capture the flow of the debate, and the mood in the council chamber – and, at the same time, retweeting others, and responding to their comments on the Twitter platform.

All was well – until just after 3 pm – when Twitter apparently decided that I’d said enough. Or rather, too much, too quickly. To be precise, I’d sent 129 tweets in two hours – a little more than one a minute.

Apparently mistaking my witty real-time analysis for Spambot droppings, Twitter shut me down and shut me out. No amount of pleading with the Twitter gods could get me back to the debate. We tried a work-around — I posted to our website, and my colleague, David Johnston, retweeted me on our main Edmonton Journal account. But I lost the lovely ability Twitter gives you to be part of an organic, evolving debate, to respond to other citizens in real time.

Looking back, I see that Twitter only had me in the penalty box for about an hour: My last tweet, before I was throttled, posted at 3:20 pm. Twitter finally let me back on at 4:15 pm.

But in the midst of a breaking news story, that hour of corporately-imposed silence seemed an eternity.

It’s a timely illustration of the dangers we in the “main stream” media face, when we rely so heavily on third-party commercial platforms to deliver our news content. I personally have embraced Twitter and Facebook as blogging tools because they allow me to connect with large audiences of people who are already interested in the things I write about, and because they allow me to play a role in an organic community conversation. It makes perfect sense for me to me to be reporting on Twitter and Facebook, because their exponential viral nature allows me to make quick, intimate connections with sub-communities of people who are passionately interested in the stories I’m covering. If I keep all my content strictly on Edmonton Journal platforms, I lose that audience, and the chance to interact with them instantly.

But as delightful and practical as it is, for a media company like mine to rely so much on another corporate entity, over which we have no control, makes us vulnerable. On Tuesday, Twitter “censored” me because of the volume of what I said. It’s not to hard to imagine a future scenario in which journalists who’ve adopted Twitter or Facebook or their successors, as news platforms truly do get censored because of the content, not the volume, of what they’ve written.

We in the mainstream media, who failed to invent widely popular social network sites of our own, have made a deal with the devil. And like all deals with the devil, it seems like sexy, easy, fun, at least at first. But in putting our trust in platforms like Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest in the hope and assumption that they’ll always be there for us, by giving them our reporting and analysis for free, we’ve left ourselves in a rather invidious position. We’ve found great new ways to reach and respond to readers – but we’ve slowly, perhaps unwittingly, surrendered some of our independence and autonomy into the bargain.

CANTO TWO

Councilor Dave Loken, as a city council meeting in 2011. (This week, he was sporting a jaunty new bow tie.)

I wasn’t the only one having Twitter woes yesterday. I was upset that Twitter locked me out. City Councilor Dave Loken is probably wishing Twitter had shut him up, too, before he tweeted words he would later regret.

After the council debate over the arena, Loken received some tweets from local community activists who oppose the arena. They pointed to an interview he gave when he was running for council, in which he was quoted as saying he opposed the idea of using tax dollars to fund the arena. They asked him to explain the apparent flip-flop. Some, like writer and sometime political candidate Mimi Williams, tweet using their names and photographs. Others, like Edmonton blogger Gary McCallum, tweet under an alias or handle (his is @CommonSenseSoc )- though you can click on their twitter avatar to find out who they actually are. Some, though, tweet anonymously, without ever revealing their identity.

Loken responded explosively to the criticism – which, as political flak goes, was actually pretty civil. When a tweeter who goes by the handle @phunphunphun called the arena funding deal “pathetic” , Loken responded, “@phunphunphun@commonsensesoc@willmimi pathetic is people like you that hide behind chicken shit monikers! At least Mimi is upfront ‪#troll “

“so? because I am a public official, people can take shots at me and slander me on Twitter and else where? and thats okay?” he wrote.

Ur, well – yes.

It’s hard to see how any of the questions people asked Loken amounted to slander. But yes, being an elected politician does, in fact, mean that people can take shots at you on Twitter, anonymously or otherwise. That’s part of being a city councilor, in 2012. It’s not pleasant. But speaking as someone who’s spent a lot of time dealing with abusive Twitter trolls, the people who were pestering Loken last night were actually a pretty tame and reasonably respectable lot.

If Loken can’t withstand that moderate degree of social media heat, he needs to grow a tougher skin.

By Wednesday afternoon, Loken had clearly calmed down enough to see the wisdom in public contrition.

“Last night, I used some inaprop words in a heated convo. I apologize for this,” he tweeted. “I was caught up in the emotion aft a long day at council.”

“As a public figure we are scrutinized and criticized, this comes with the territory. My apologies for reacting the way I did.”

Obviously, there’s nothing particularly new, or even newsworthy, in a politician saying something rude or stupid on Twitter. The speed and intimacy of the medium is tailor-made to capture us all in the heat of the moment, saying something we’d rather forget. In McLuhan’s terms, it’s a hot medium, not a cool one. I hesitate to play gotcha with politicians on Twitter, because I think that it’s a wonderful thing to have them there, interacting with the rest of us, journalists and voters alike, in real time conversation. (I hesitate to say play gotcha, too, because one day, while I’m tweeting at one tweet a minute, I’m going to say something colossally stupid and offensive. The odds are surely stacked against me.)

Twitter has been a tremendous and important element in our whole arena debate – and none of us, journalists, politicians, community activists, and regular joes – should take it for granted. As Dave Loken and I both learned Tuesday, it doesn’t always allow us to play to our strengths.

The pecking order of Twitter means it’s not a venue for chickens – or for those who get their feathers easily ruffled.

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